The invention relates to an apparatus for assisting decisions for improvement of environmental loads in a life cycle of a product.
According to efforts toward management and improvement of environmental loads of a manufacturing industry in the related arts, it is a present situation that a grasp of an amount of environmental loads caused by manufacturing activities in order to write it onto an environment report and a life cycle assessment (LCA) per product are independently executed. Although the environmental loads of the manufacturing activities are closely related to a manufacturing schedule such as the number of manufactured products or the like, since a link of the environmental loads between the product and a process of the manufacturing activities is not established, it is a present situation that a schedule to reduce the environmental loads in consideration of future manufacturing schedule and product strategy cannot be made.
According to an environmental load information system disclosed in JP-A-2002-99674, in each step (process) of the enterprise activities, environmental load information is individually collected, the collected environmental load information is analyzed, and environmental loads and the like per step, per base station, and per product are obtained and provided for discrimination about management.
In Patent Document 1 (JP-A-2002-99674), there has been disclosed such a technique that information collected from a manufacturing information system for collecting environmental load information in manufacturing steps is processed and environmental loads which are caused by manufacturing a product is obtained every product. With respect to indirect environmental loads, there has also been disclosed such a technique that they are proportionally distributed per product in accordance with a using situation (area ratio) of a building per product and a ratio of the number of persons in charge which have been obtained from a management system information system.
In the actual manufacturing site, however, in the case of presuming, particularly, a manufacturing industry of an assembling system, ordinarily, a plurality of parts and products are manufactured by one manufacturing process or common parts exist among different products. It is a problem that in such a situation where the parts constructing the product and their processes are not independent every product as mentioned above, how the environmental load per product is calculated from the environmental loads of each manufacturing process.
Further, nothing is considered with respect to a method of making an environmental load reducing schedule in consideration of a manufacturing schedule on the assumption that a link between the manufacturing activities and the environmental loads of the product has been established.